Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Converting Your Story from Book to eBook

Many of my friends, who are curious to know how I accomplished the conversion of Apart From Love from book to ebook, ask me to explain, in excruciating detail, how to do it. My best advice to you, having gone through the process, is not to rush things, or you will create a mess.

Once you convert your story from book to ebook, you have two separate copies of your work. So later, if you want to make a change--even as simple as fixing a punctuation mark--you are left with the need to do it twice, or to start keeping a log of your changes. This gets even more complicated if you maintain several ebook formats: a .epub one for the iPad, a .epub one for the Nook and a .mobi one for the Kindle. It takes some experience to learn that there is a way to collapse these separate files into one, but knowing this came, for me, at the cost of having done things in an order that I would have reversed, had I known better.

So in spite of this great enthusiasm that drives you to convert your book and put it out there, so the readers can start flocking to your door, I suggest you wait until you're sure, absolutely sure, that your story is complete. Done. Finished to the last period. And then wait some more.
Once you are ready, here is a great article by Aaron Shephard called From Word to Kindle.

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